


The Supernatural Top Gear Challenge

by cribbins



Category: Supernatural, Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-17
Updated: 2011-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-20 12:11:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/212650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cribbins/pseuds/cribbins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Now, the more traditional way of getting rid of ghosts involves incantations, ancient rites, candles, and maybe some Enya, playing in the background. However, seeing as this is America, we’re going to do this the American way.”</p><p>Clarkson lifted the shotgun up into frame and cocked it.</p><p>“We’re going to shoot the ghosts in the face with salt.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Supernatural Top Gear Challenge

“Hello, and welcome to a Top Gear Special,” the camera closed in on Clarkson, “where we go to the deepest bowels of the United States to find out, once and for all, the perfect vehicle for a spot of demon hunting.”  
________________________________________________

The next shot was of a couple of months before. You could tell as Hammond’s hair was shorter and less silly. May’s hair was shorter but equally silly, and Clarkson’s hair hadn’t changed at all. Clarkson’s hair never changed. There were some photos that suggested that it expanded slightly in the seventies, but that may just have been due to the angle of the picture.

The three of them were parked up by cross-roads, in the middle of vast acres of corn fields. Clarkson and Hammond were smiling perkily at the camera. May looked mere seconds away from committing murder.

“You might notice that the show isn’t quite up to the same standard of quality as the others, in terms of cameras, lighting, sound, this is because we’re doing it all ourselves.” Hammond sounded fairly excited by the prospect.

Clarkson stepped in seamlessly. “Because when we told the BBC what we were going to do, three lawyers simultaneously soiled themselves. We were then threatened with immediate terminations of our contracts if we attempted to make this programme under the name of the BBC. However, in our own time, with our own money, we can do what we want. We’re grown-ups.” He finished emphatically.

“We’re still going to get fired, though.” May added sulkily.

Clarkson broke his professional ‘talking to camera’ pose and turned to face him. “Look, if you don’t want to be here, then why are you?”

May pointed to the other man. “Because that little toad has Fusker.”

“He’s in a safe place.” Hammond said aside to the camera.

Clarkson turned to Hammond with dawning realisation on his face. “Hammond, when I said persuade him, I did not mean kidnap his cat, you tiny freak.” Then after an awkward pause “however, saying that it’s brilliant. Well done.”

Hammond looked pleased with himself.

May didn’t look pleased with anyone.  
________________________________________________

The three of them, at a back-roads, hillbilly scrap-yard, cursorily examined the cars on offer. May’s disembodied voice started expositioning over the top of the soundtrack from some months in the future.

The truth is that the BBC didn’t even know we were here. The last time we saw Andy, our producer, he was facing the wall with his fingers in his ears and singing while we pilfered the necessary sound equipment.  
________________________________________________

“Well what about that one?”

“It’s tiny. Where are you going to put any of the equipment?”

“Well it’s fast…”

“It’s ridiculous.”  
________________________________________________

Once again and with alarming punctuality, the search for cars had descended into petty squabbling.

“I quite like this one.”

“But look at the…and what about….no.”

“Well what’s wrong with that?”

“No…just, just no.”

We decided that in order to buy a car by at the very latest next week, not even counting the fact that we had until the end of the day, we were going to have to go our own separate ways.  
________________________________________________

The light was dimmer and Clarkson appeared to be standing in the spitting rain on the bank of a river. The monolithic black bridge stretched over the water behind him, like a monolithic black thing, that allowed transport over rivers.

It was all very atmospheric.

“Well, it’s the end of the day, our time is up and I’ve been assured that we’ve all acquired trusty supernatural-hunting steeds, although we’re still waiting for May to make his grand entrance.”

“Unless he’s broken down,” wondered Hammond.

“Unless he’s broken down,” agreed Clarkson.

“Or he’s lost.”

“How could he be lost? All the roads in this wretched little town lead here.”

Hammond looked at him.

“Yes, he’s probably lost….oh, no, wait. That’s not. Oh God he hasn’t has he.”

“He always does this to himself.”

The camera changed angle to show May pulling up in a dull blue, rusted bucket-heap of a truck. The engine ticked and whirled and growled all at the same time in a way that was not generally regarded as healthy.

He hopped out and did an awkward half walk – half jog to the other two, stuck somewhere between amused and worried.

“Chaps.”

“But why?” was all Hammond could manage.

“I’ll explain it all. Who wants to go first?”

“That would be me.” Clarkson always had a way of pulling rank in the most inconsequential of situations. The camera pulled into him as he wordlessly strode over to what he’d paid for earlier that day.

“Meet…the Chevrolet K-10.”

The shot pulled back and revealed that Clarkson was standing in front of a truck that was dwarfing him. It was dwarfing everything. It was a massive, hulking, tank-like piece of machinery. It had what looked like a flight of stairs to get into the driving seat.

It was also shiny and black.

“Just look at the size of it,” Clarkson squeaked enthusiastically. “I mean, this thing wouldn’t look out of place patrolling the streets of Iraq. If anything, when it comes to tackling Casper the Friendly Ghost, this thing is overkill.”

“For once,” Hammond piped up, “I agree with you.” The camera swivelled to focus on Hammond, who was standing in front of his purchase. “It looks as if I’m the only one to have bought an actual car. This is a 1967 Chevrolet Impala.” He turned to it, obviously quite pleased with himself. The car was shiny and black as well, if the discerning audience were to notice a theme.

Hammond gesticulated emphatically with his hands, palms spread flat downwards. “It’s smaller, it’s faster and it’s less noticeable than the two pick-up trucks.”

He looked away from camera to give it a slightly longing look. “It’s also really quite pretty, which I don’t say about many American cars. In fact I may not have said that about any American car, ever, but I’m willing to make an exception this once.”

“So you don’t think it’s too small, then?” Clarkson looked a little incredulous.

“What?” The car was smaller than Clarkson’s behemoth, but was still an American car and as such was unimaginably wide and twice as long any European model that had ever existed. “I’ve owned flats in London smaller than this.”

“Probably cheaper to run, too.” May added snidely, wandering in from the right of the frame.

“Oh you cannot say a word until you explain what that thing is.” Hammond pointed off in the direction May had come – towards May’ own pick-up.

“That, Gentlemen,” said May, striding towards it while the camera followed, “is a 1968 Ford F-350.”

“…and what the hell is it doing here?”

May continued to look keen about his truck, unabated by the hoots of the other two. It looked as if it were built before trucks had even been invented, and that it would survive an apocalypse.

“What you need in situations like these is a vehicle that is sturdy, tough and easily fixable. This pick-up is all three. If it got smashed up for whatever reason, miles from nowhere, and all you had to fix it was a ball of blue-tack and bits of sheep then you’d still be home in time for tea. Plus, what Clarkson and Hammond aren’t taking into account is what I lack in speed, I make up for in storage capability.” He walked round to the back of the pick-up and pointed down into the pan. “I could fix a rocket-launcher in there.”  
________________________________________________

All we needed now was an unwitting member of the undead to bother. Luckily, we had already found something.

Clarkson held a printed-out paper up to the camera to see. “Here’s an article from the 12th of June. A car carrying two people is hit off a West Virginia stretch of road. Neither of them saw the vehicle. Not as in ‘oh, it was dark and everything happened so fast’, but as in there was nothing actually there.”

That’s not all, said the Clarkson from the future. If you go back a few months, there’s another one. If you go back a few more months, there’s one more, exactly the same. Look back a bit and these crashes have been happening, regular as clockwork, on this stretch of road, for four years.

And they were getting worse.

The three walked towards their respective vehicles, about to depart for West Virginia.

“So who do you think is going to win?” Hammond asked May, backs facing the camera.

“I think we’re all going to die.” said May in time-honoured tradition.  
________________________________________________

Through May’s windscreen, the Impala’s tail lights could be made out through the dark and the rain, blearily. The shot cut to May.

“Any car that I had accused of being uncomfortable, I take it all back. I apologise. I’ve never known true pain until now. The truck has no suspension, the engine rattles the entire frame, it lurches for no discernable reason and there’s barely any padding in the bloody seats. I might as well be sitting on jagged rocks.”

May grimaced.

“I think my left buttock has died.”  
________________________________________________

Hammond had set his own camera up on the dashboard of the Impala.

“This car, it isn’t the smoothest ride in the world, not by a long shot. You can actually -feel - the engine growling, right the way through the car. But the power that the engine is giving out is unbelievable. It’s so fast. It accelerates like a car 30 years younger. It drives, for lack of a better word, like a bastard.”

He turned his attention back to the road for a second, before thinking of something else to say.

“Oh! And I almost forgot the best bit. I found this under the passenger seat. It’s a box full of cassette tapes of seventies and eighties metal.” He held a tape up for the camera to see.

“I’m going to have to.”

He fumbled the tape into the player. A few seconds later the opening chords to Enter the Sandman came throbbing out of the speakers to Hammond’s ever expanding grin.  
________________________________________________

May pulled up outside a race track and was shortly followed by Hammond, who arrived in a haze of electric guitar noise.

“What on earth is he listening to?”  
________________________________________________

Hammond clambered out of the Impala clutching the cardboard box. “Look what I got with the car!” He held one of the tapes up to Clarkson’s face. Clarkson swatted the hand aside and had a rummage through the box.

“What, these were in the car when you bought it?”

“Under the passenger seat.”

Clarkson gasped melodramatically and clutched a particular tape in his hands. “I haven’t heard this one in years.” His voice had become impossibly high and squeaky.

“You could play it in your car.” Hammond said graciously, as keeper of the hair-metal.

“Yes! No! I can’t! All it’s got is a [BEEP] CD player.”

“Oh well. Too bad.” Hammond comforted, a little too chirpily, and snatched the tape back from Clarkson’s despondent fingers. “Guess you’ll just have to listen to STEPS instead.”

“That wasn’t. Mine.” Clarkson didn’t look too happy at the re-emergence of some age-old, long forgotten piss-take.  
________________________________________________

“I think I know this one,” remarked May, squinting at one of the labels.  
________________________________________________

We had a total of four days to make it to West Virginia, said Hammond, which means we had plenty of time to stop off at this race-track on the way and run our Ghostbuster-mobiles through a few tests.

Clarkson stood in front of the two Chevies and the Ford, parked by a start line.

“Sturdiness and reliability, they all have their place. But one of the most important things is speed, so, to find out whose is the fastest, we pass over to our tame racing driver and temporary cameraman.

“Some say that he has pies for eyes and chips for lips. Others, that he can be summoned by singing ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ by the Human League, backwards. All we know is, he’s called the Stig.”

With that, Hammond’s Impala screeched off of the starting line. A few seconds into the track, Clarkson’s face dropped.

“How fast is that going?”

Hammond looked just about ready to pop something internal from excitement. “I told you. I told you she was fast!”

“Yes, but I didn’t believe you. Where did you get that?”

“The same place you got yours.”

“Well, that’s not fair!”

“How?”

Clarkson’s car was next and made it round the track in an exceeding respectable time, considering that an Albanian family of 11 could live inside it quite comfortably.

May’s car was last. It accelerated sluggishly off the starting line and kept speeding up until it hit 60 miles per hour, where it plateau’d. It was a miserable, embarrassing lap. Clarkson and Hammond were laughing so hard they were in a danger of making themselves vomit. May looked as if he were holding on to the last pale vestiges of optimism in his truck.

“Well I didn’t buy it for speed, did I?”

“The engine….is smoking.” Hammond sounded as if breathing through laughs was beginning to become a problem.

After May had embarrassed himself and four-wheeled vehicles everywhere, we were off again, unsuspectingly driving further and further away from civilisation.  
________________________________________________

On a weather-beaten main street in a small, American town, a group of seedy looking gentlemen with large beards and larger hats (that presumably acted as ballast for the tops of their heads) peered accusingly at the camera. One of them spat onto the sidewalk, telling the camera in so many words that this was a place where people would spit onto the ground whenever they so fancied, so you’d better get used to it. It was much like the usual welcoming committee one would find in Bromley.  
________________________________________________

Parked some way out of the town Clarkson stood proudly by his Chevrolet Gigantic-Bastard.

“We’ve bought the cars, and now we’ve tooled them up accordingly for supernatural-hunting. Now, the more traditional way of getting rid of ghosts involves incantations, ancient rites, candles, and maybe some Enya, playing in the background. However, seeing as this is America, we’re going to do this the American way.”

Clarkson lifted the shotgun up into frame and cocked it.

“We’re going to shoot the ghosts in the face with salt.”  
________________________________________________

And to know what exactly we were getting ourselves into, we were going to have to do a spot of investigating first, said May. Before we went talking to the local rozzers, we decided first to get the word straight from the horse’s mouth. Using the names from the article and a facility on the internet that I can’t quite believe is not illegal, we tracked down the addresses of the latest crash victims.

The Impala pulled to a stop outside a house and Hammond picked up the camera, holding it to his face. “Alright, this is the place. Now we decided that I would probably be the best one to go talk…..oh bugger.”  
________________________________________________

Clarkson strode confidently up the front drive.  
________________________________________________

In the brown and chintzy front room, May and Clarkson were perched agitatedly on the sofa. The elderly man in the armchair closest to the electric fire squinted suspiciously at them.

“So, journalists, huh?” he ventured, essentially repeating back what he had just been told, but in a manner that suggested he had trouble swallowing the story.

“Yep” offered Hammond’s voice from behind the camera.

“And you wanna interview me about that crash?”

“Again, yes” said Hammond’s voice once more.

The man squinted some more.

“Why aren’t those two saying anything?” He gestured towards the two on the couch with his crutch.

“It’s for the best” said Hammond’s voice, wearily.

“So what d’ya wanna know?”

“Just to confirm a few points with you. When you said you didn’t see any car…”

“There wasn’t any car.” The old man was quite convinced on that front. “Whatever I got hit by, it wasn’t any car. Now I got hit by something, I got a dent in my minivan and six weeks in traction to prove that, but – and I’m telling you boys the God’s honest truth here – I didn’t see anything but road and trees. If I didn’t know any better, I’d’ve said it was invisible.”

There was a moment of silence.

“And just to clarify – you weren’t drunk?” Clarkson had opened his mouth to weigh in.

“No” said the man.

“And you aren’t mental?”

“No.” The man thudded his crutch on the floor for emphasis.

“No onset of Alzheimer’s or anything?”

“Look, it happened like I said it happened. Now get out before Maud gets home, you’ll give her a turn.”

“Right, thanks.” Clarkson seemed satisfied.

“Thank you for your time.” Hammond attempted at a salvage while getting up, the angle of the shot rising with him, but not by much.

“Just see yourselves out.”  
________________________________________________

The three of them were crammed into a booth at a roadside diner, the camera now back in the hands of their one lone technician.

“Well that could have gone better.” Hammond glared accusingly.

“We got everything we needed?” Clarkson, genuinely puzzled, or at least doing a damn good impression of it, raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. It was a face that said ‘yes I know I did that thing, but there you are – never mind’.

“You did repeatedly insult him,” interjected May, taking Hammond’s side in the United Front Against Clarkson.

“Well someone had to ask it, and bloody house-wives’ favourite over there wasn’t going to do it” Clarkson sounded accused and flicked a finger towards Hammond.

U.F.A.C. glowered. “He wasn’t going to concur with you, was he?” May battled valiantly on with logic but kept battering against the steel wall of ‘I am right’ that was Clarkson’s face.

Clarkson merely shrugged. “So how’re your cars?” He offered such a blatant attempt at changing the subject that the other two felt almost compelled to go along with it.

“Uhhh, good” offered Hammond eloquently. “Actually really, really good. I’m surprised, I have to tell you.”

“Yeah, it actually looks like it drives well. Have you had a look under the hood?”

“I have, and I can tell you that almost nothing is original. Some of it isn’t even Chevrolet.”

“…which would explain the performance.”

“It would a bit, yeah.”

“But you like it?”

“I really do. Metallicar’s a good motor.”

The other two were, at that moment, struck dumb with pure delight as this new, fresh piece of ribbing material came tumbling out of Hammond’s mouth. Hammond’s face dropped a bit as the other two started giggling.

“I can’t believe you named another car.”

“I can’t believe you named it Metallicar.”

“You know, because of….the tapes…”

The sniggering continued.

“ANYWAY.” Hammond bellowed over the top. “Clarkson. Yours?”

“Yeah, fine, not many complaints. It’s tacky and the clutch and the steering are heavy, and….”

“…and?”

“It may be too big.”

Hammond grinned in schaedenfreudic glee. “May?”

“I want to kill it. I want to kill it with my bare hands. I want to see it die.” He said it so calmly that you could almost miss the meaning of the words, but hair had started to fall in front of his eyes; in his quiet rage he was nodding quite vigorously.

“That bad?”

“The steering…and the clutch…and the suspens…” He was now choking on his own anger and was trying to make out what he meant with violent hand gestures. More hair fell into his face. “I’m going to crash it into a tree, just for the joy of it.”

“Riiiiiiight.” Clarkson recovered from the psychological ticking time-bomb that was May in remarkable speed. “So, what’s next?”

“Next is, uh, well, talking to the Old Bill, I suppose.” Hammond grimaced.

“This will end badly” said May, stonily.  
________________________________________________

In the entrance hall to the tiny local sheriff’s department, Clarkson was once again powering ahead to intercept the victim first. A fat Desk-Sergeant with an alarmingly blurry face was lounging behind the counter.

The officer here has asked for his face to be pixellated on account of him being an absolute moron and a cretin of the highest order.

“What can I do for you gentlemen?”

“Yes, uh, if we could speak to an officer that deals with road collisions?”

“I’m the only one here at the moment, boys.”

“You’re the only one here. In the whole building?” Hammond seemed incredulous.

“Well everyone else is out on patrol, now, aren’t they? Can I help you at all?”

“We wanted to ask about the crash on the 11th of June?” Clarkson held the printed-out article prospectively.

The Desk-Sergeant looked at the three of them in turn and then dead down the camera lens. His face remained pixellated but he gave of the air of one whose brain mechanisms were rotating laboriously,

“You press?”

“We’re journalists, yes.” Clarkson skipped lightly over the truth.

“Well what’dya wanna know? Just a car crash.” The man’s tone had become a sight more hostile now he thought he was dealing with press. Foreign press.

“Except it wasn’t just a car crash. Neither of the people in that car saw anything on the road at all. You’ll know this; you’d have taken statements from them?”

“It was dark. Everything happens fast in these hit'n'runs.”

“But if you look back a few months there’s another one, and another one the same amount of time before that. It’s an average of four car crashes for four years. Look.” Clarkson handed over the wedge of print-outs.

The Desk-Sergeant flicked through them. “What can I say? Dangerous stretch of road.”

“They’re all exactly the same.” Clarkson’s wobbly grasp on his own temper had begun to wane and his voice was doing that thing where it became increasingly loud. “Have you not noticed a connection?”

The Desk-Sergeant, unaware of who Clarkson was, what Clarkson’s somewhat infamous reputation was, or probably where England was, leaned his portly figure back into his desk-chair even as Clarkson hunched over his counter.

“What’re you implying?”

“That there’s a connection?” Clarkson, not good when faced with wilful ignorance at the best of times, was wearing the expression that suggested he was about to do something dangerous. “I’m surprised you lot hadn’t figured this out for yourselves yet. It’s achingly obvious. I mean, what do you do all day?”

“Now, we’re a small department trying to keep tabs on this town with limited resources. We haven’t got time to go running around investigating every wild and stupid story we get thrown.”

“By twelve completely unconnected sets of people in alarming regularity?”

“Well, you know, people make up these ideas and then they get on the internet...”

“The internet? You think these people are conspiring on the internet? Do you not have to take some kind of test before they let you become a police officer these days?”

Hammond, who could be seen to the right of the shot, slouched perceptibly, sensing such concepts as ‘arrest’ and ‘charges’ were bearing themselves down on them inescapably.

“I’m sorry, are you questioning me?” The old Desk-Sergeant seemed to have run to the end of his thread as well and now was heaving himself up in his chair and swelling like an angry frog.

Hammond buried his face in one of his hands.

May, who had a more pragmatic approach, stepped in in an attempt to broker negotiations of a sort.

“No, no. No questions. Err, sorry to bother you. Must be off now.” He then attempted to bodily manhandle Clarkson out of the door before he started demanding the taste of blood. Clarkson decided against it and stalked out of the door himself, which was lucky for May, as the alternative wouldn’t have been a very elegant display.

We had had the unfortunate luck of trying to rendezvous with an officer of the law so brain-dead that the only way reasonable conclusion was that he was actually in a permanent vegetative state and was only miraculously giving the illusion of speech and movement. Clarkson’s voice sounded still enraged months after the incident.

Even more unluckily, this meeting had now put us on the radar of the local sheriff’s department, who had taken to following us around and loitering menacingly at us from corners.  
________________________________________________

A tall man in a beige uniform, a gun and a pair of mirrored shades stood outside a shop and stared sullenly at the camera. Hammond looked on nervously.

One man, who must have been hired for the sole reason that he was the size of a beach hut, was under the impression that he was a member of the Gestapo circa. 1974 and actually tried to go through my grocery purchases to see if I was buying anything that would mark me out as a filthy capitalist spy.  
________________________________________________

A patrol car rolled ominously slowly past the pedestrian-bound trio.

We weren’t going to get anything else from town, so we ponied up and headed out to the mysteriously vindictive stretch of asphalt.

It was crash night.  
________________________________________________

Clarkson, calmed by now, was attempting a spot of car reviewing to the camera on his dashboard.

“You can tell why businessmen and housewives would want to drive one of these monstrosities around to go to lunch meetings and to pick up little Justin from clarinet practice. It really gives you an over-inflated sense of self-importance. You feel like yo…[BEEEEEP].”

Clarkson had turned his attention back to the road fully and was wrenching left hard on the steering wheel. The tyres squealed as he slammed on the brakes. The camera on the dash-board wobbled alarmingly. Clarkson turned an interesting shade of puce.

Everything came to a stop. “Well what the [BEEP]?”  
________________________________________________

Out of the Ford’s windscreen, Clarkson’s K-10 was sprawled louchely across both lanes. The shot turned to May with a walkie-talkie. “Clarkson, are you alright, mate?”

The walkie-talkie crackled. “Yeah, I’m fine. There was someone in the road but I never hit anything. Did you see anything?”

“No, no, all I saw was you swerving.”

“Well I think that may have been our blo…”

Anything else was cut off by the sound of slamming metal, the distinct sound of a car being hit. Forcibly. There was nothing but the three cars for miles, and yet Clarkson’s car skidded across the road, leaving black marks from dragged tyres. Clarkson was swearing vile and imaginative curses down the walkie-talkie.

There were a few moments of silence, before the K-10 was struck again, skidding closer to the verge and lifting up onto two wheels with the force of the impact.

“[BEEP],” said May, unsure as how to proceed.

The truck took one last bone-shattering impact and skidded right to the edge of the road. Any other car would have been whizzing merrily into the treetops with the power of the blow, but the K-10 was roughly the weight of a dwarf-star. The truck leaned listlessly at the edge, over the sloping verge, before succumbing to gravity and slewing down the hill a few feet and burying itself in the dirt.  
________________________________________________

The shot juddered nauseatingly as whoever was operating the camera ran towards the K-10, now snuggled into the grassy bank. Just ahead was May and Hammond was out in front. Hammond, getting to the car first, scrambled on top and wrenched open the passenger door that swung out upwards.

“Ow.” An angry voice emerged from the truck, shortly followed by a demanding hand being thrust out of the open hole. Hammond was still perched on top of the truck and grabbed it. He attempted to yank Clarkson, many times heavier, out. It wasn’t a wild success. May lumbered up onto the truck and added his arm to the ‘free Clarkson’ campaign. Clarkson’s curly head could be seen, then his infuriated face, then the rest of him as he pulled himself out and made towards ground.

“Are you hurt?”

“Bit banged up, I’m fine.”

“Did you hit your head?” Hammond tried to figure out if Clarkson had concussion.

“No, I’m fine, I’m more worried about what happened to the truck than would you stop fondling me.”

Hammond ripped his hands off like he’d discovered Clarkson was coated in a fine layer of anthrax. “Right.” Then, “Do we call for a tow? I mean, do we wait here?”

“Or we could go back to the motel and then phone them from there?”

“Yes, let’s do that, that’s a good plan.”  
________________________________________________

Clarkson was holding the camera up to his face in the passenger seat of the Impala. “I’m going to be extraordinarily sore in the morning, more than I am now and right now I’m considering having May carry me everywhere for the rest of the trip.”

We were running away scared after our bowel-loosening encounter with the spook. Our first time hunting and we were already down a Chevrolet K-10. The plan was to retreat to the motel as quick as possible.

Clarkson grumbled and fidgeted, like a man who was merely moving from one bruise on his arse to the next.

“What’s that?” Hammond’s voice came from off-screen, as well as his hand, which shoved into the screen from the right to point at something out of Clarkson’s side of the car.

“What?” The enthusiasm was missing from Clarkson’s voice.

“There’s something over there.”

Squinting into the dark, Clarkson repeated: “What?”

“Look, I’ll pull over.”

“What?” Clarkson conveyed his displeasure by dropping his voice several octaves.

Gravel crunched as Hammond pulled over to the side of the road and then got out of the car. Clarkson sighed heavily; his eyes reflected the resignation of those at the mercy of the truly stupid. He also exited the car and turned the camera to capture May pulling up and winding down his window, pissily.

“Why have we stopped?”

“Hammond saw something.”

“That’s not a reason to stop.”

Clarkson was very careful to not disagree with May as he turned and made after the other presenter.

“That’s a reason to speed up.”  
________________________________________________

“It’s an old garage.” Hammond was sweeping his torch across the detritus in the uninhibited shack. May, rooting around in paperwork, picking up papers and peering at them with his penlight clutched between his teeth, garbled something phlegmily.

“And that was?”

May removed the torch from his mouth. “Which would explain the car connection, one supposes.” Then he said “Aha!” and clutched what appeared to be a letter aloft. “Robert Cribbins. May we leave now?”

Clarkson snatched it out of his hands. “Good enough, let’s go.”

Something thumped.

“”Now. Lets go. Now. Go go go go go.”  
________________________________________________

An outside shot of the motel told everything that one needed to be told about the place: that it was small, that it was seedy and it was likely that it was the only place that would accept them as guests.

We made it back to the motel in one piece and decided to call it a night and to settle on what to do in the morning. Do we call it a day and head home, thus proving the mimsy BBC solicitors right, or plunge ever-stupidly onwards? We decided to sleep on it.  
________________________________________________

May fumbled with the hand-held camera, holding it up to his face. Bleary-eyed and with a face that looked particularly ravaged and saggy from lack of sleep, he addressed the screen in a low but clipped tone:

“The motel management, in their wisdom, have put me in a room that seems to be surrounded on either side by…” He searched for an appropriate term. “…ladies of the evening. I’ve been trying to sleep with the noise of sweaty, grunting American businessmen seeping through the walls in…well…in surround-sound.”

He stopped and thought of the next thing to say.

“…and my room smells like piss.”

A look of dawning horror crossed his face.

“…I hope they weren’t in here last night.”

There was a second of darkness before the picture returned, obviously later in the night, if the extent of the sag in May’s face could be treated as some kind of rudimentary clock.

“As much as I admire work-ethic, this is getting bloody ridiculous.”  
________________________________________________

The night before, Clarkson intoned, I had phoned some unlucky tow service to go dig my Chevrolet out of the verge for an astronomical fee. They called me the next morning to tell me that there had been a catastrophic failure in all the car’s electrics. It was being written off.

The poltergeist had killed my car. Before I had been wary of proceeding, but now? This had become a tale of revenge.

Clarkson looked at his shotgun in a loving manner.  
________________________________________________

Hammond, sitting on the Motel bed, was crouched over the laptop on his knees whilst Clarkson sorted through some very pointy looking knives. May’s eyes slid shut every few seconds, a move that was occasionally accompanied with a head bob. May lurched back into wakefulness whenever his chin hit his chest.

“Here we go.” Hammond was mumbling distractedly and punching keys. “Yeah, here we go.” He looked up and regarded May. “Wake him up?”

Clarkson went to wake him up.

“Not with the knife.”

Clarkson woke him up without the knife.

The laptop was passed to Clarkson who scanned through the screen. “That sounds like our bloke” he judged after a cursory scan of the article on the screen.

“Too many coincidences for it to not be.”

“That and he sounded like a right [BEEP] when he was alive. Makes sense he’s be a [BEEP] when he’s dead.”

Bo Cribbins, said Clarkson, mechanic, wifebeater, all round wanker, was run over on that stretch of road in 2003, by his own wife, who got off of the charge of murder after claiming, quite rightly, to have done it in self defence.

May was taking long, exaggerated blinks to wake himself up, and then saw Clarkson’s array of weaponry on the bed, at which point he was very much awake.

“So how does this help us?” asked May.

“Well we know what grave to dig up now.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Salting and burning the bones is probably the easiest way to get rid of a poltergeist.” Hammond said it like it was a perfectly reasonable and every-day thing to do. Then he looked down at the screen. “Except. Ah. It looks like he’s been cremated already.”

May held his face with his hands. “And this means what?”

"S’pose it means that something of him didn’t get cremated; no clue what, though. We’ll probably find him at that old garage. We can do an exorcism on him there.”

“…..do we have a plan? At all?”

“Well, we go there, with the cars, and we kill it…”

“It kills us. We rot there for years until someone discovers our corpses.”

“……We kill it, then we decide which the best car was, then we go home. Ta-dah” finished Hammond.

“Your faith in our survival is frightening.”

Clarkson had shut down the laptop and was standing up. “You’re a miserable old bugger this morning. What’s wrong with you?”

James stood as well. “No. No, I’m fine. The three of us are prancing merrily into the jaws of death, as per usual. Must be Sunday.”  
________________________________________________

“Let’s say we all do our very best not to shoot one another, alright chaps?”

Clarkson was holding his shotgun in a manner that suggested that he wasn’t making promises to anyone. “Yep. Fine.”

The camera tracked them through the abandoned shack from behind. With torches in one hand and guns in the other, they looked skittish and woefully unready to be dealing with this sort of thing. Like many of their ideas, it had seemed brilliant at the time of devising and the height of idiocy when they were forced to actually carry it out.

The shack stayed obstinately silent around them.

“Maybe he’s not in?”

Things started flying to the floor.

“Nope. No such bloody luck.”

The right corner of the shot became foggy for a second before the white smear condensed into something human-shaped. In seeing Bo for the first time, Clarkson screamed less than manfully and shot salt in his direction. It wasn’t exactly in his direction though, missing him by a few feet. The figure disappeared and things unlucky enough to have gotten in the way of Clarkson’s shot exploded and fell over in equal amounts.

Bo emerged in a different part of the room. All three, this time, squealed profanities and then had a go at shooting the bugger. Bo was again gone by the time any of the shots got to him (assuming, quite generously, that any were even on target).

With the camera swivelling in what seemed to be every direction at once to catch the action, Hammond could be seen to bite his lip, squint, line up a shot and empty his barrel in the direction of Bo the poltergeist in the centre of the room, who was blasted through and broke up like smoke, leaving the round of salt to continue unimpeded and bury itself half a foot away from May’s head.

“YOU [BEEP]. YOU UTTER, ABSOLUTE [BEEP]. WHAT THE [BEEEP] ARE YOU DOING YOU ALMOST HAD MY [BEEEEEP] [BEEP] HEAD OFF. [BEEEEEP]”.

Hammond apologised as he was reloading and then span 180’ while screaming to let off a shot at the ceiling, killing several wooden boards. A shower of debris came tumbling downwards.

“Stop. Shooting at things before we all die.” May looked as if he wasn’t sure whether he was more afraid of the poltergeist or Clarkson and Hammond’s trigger-happy fingers and fuzzy concepts of ‘aim’.

The poltergeist, possibly attracted by all the wailing, materialised in front of May, who squeezed the trigger of his rifle in shock. By miraculous luck the shot blasted straight through the ghost’s middle, and the figure became wispy, and then dissipated.

They held a moment, waiting for the next onslaught, but they were greeted with only mildly suspicious silence.

They waited a bit longer.

Nothing.

Hammond accidentally let off his gun into the floor.

“Sorry! Sorry.”  
________________________________________________

We were all determined to wait the ghosty out, so we retreated to the Impala, down the path.

“The ghost has obviously decided to go to ground, and all we can do is sit here quietly and wait. Hopefully it’ll think we’ve moved on, and come back to the house.” Here Hammond paused a little for dramatic effect. “We’re on a stake-out.”

“He’ll know we’re here if you keep opening your mouth.” Clarkson sounded tired and irritable. “The moonlight’s reflecting off your teeth.”

May snorted.  
________________________________________________

And wait…

…and wait.

The men, as the night progressed, could be seen to have shifted to different positions in different parts of the car. A series of jump-cuts took them to four in the morning in little under 10 seconds.

Such is the glory of editing.

Hammond suddenly sat up a little. “What’s that?”

Clarkson looked out of the back window, where the noise was coming from. “That? That….um….

“That’s May’s truck.”  
________________________________________________

“The Ford’s on fire the Ford’s on fire the Ford’s on fire…”

Hammond ran into shot.

“…the Ford’s on fire…”

Hammond ran out of shot.

He returned the way he had come, but now armed with a fire-extinguisher. “May, your [BEEP] truck is on fire.”

All the while the shot had been focused on May, who had, in fact, noticed what had happened to his truck and was watching events unfold with keen interest while his brain slowly digested all the facts.

“…..oh, cock.”  
________________________________________________

Some integral part of the truck at this point decided to explode, sending a fireball hurtling into the air. Hammond was still a good distance away but toppled over under the force of the blast. He then lay there on the ground, staring with morbid interest at May’s complete write-off.  
________________________________________________

The flames were now colouring May’s face and the surrounding scenery orange.

“Cock. COCK.” The third exclamation released some deep and as-yet untapped well of frustration that spurred May into movement, running off to find something of use, possibly the number for the nearest good mental hospital.  
________________________________________________

Instead however, May had fetched a book of exorcisms and a rifle. “Gentlemen. Shall we?” He sounded a lot calmer that he undoubtedly was. He had the eyes of a man who had very recently become unhinged.  
________________________________________________

Tired, angry and twitchy, the three stomped back inside the shack.

Re-entering the house for the second time, we had little more to go on than ‘distract the ghost while James does the exorcism’. Less than thrilled with the plan, but unable to think of anything cleverer, we barrelled ahead. The tone of Hammond’s voice-over sounded ominous.

“So where is he?”

A deafening rattling and clattering answered Clarkson. All three looked down to the floor, to where the noise was emanating from. “I suppose it would be the buggering cellar, wouldn’t it?” He huffed, noisily. “Alright, we might as well.”

They headed down the stairs, to about halfway, before Clarkson stopped, shot the gun ahead of him and screamed “[BEEP] OFF.”

They descended the rest of the way. May cracked open the book and shuffled the pages until he found what he was looking for. He placed the book down on a work bench, bent over it with a torch and started reciting.

“Sancte Míchael Archángele, defénde nos in proélio contra nequítiam et insídias diáboli esto præsídium. Imperet illi Deus….uuuuh….”

A few shots were let off, off-screen.

“LESS LEISURLEY PLEASE, MAY.”

May dutifully but huffily sped up the rate at which he read the incantation.

The camera swivelled to where Hammond was, yelling in staccato. “ARGH. Wait, where is…ARGH.” He shot into the gloom. “Is he….Bugger. BUGGER.” Hammond whirled around ineffectively, looking for Bo Cribbins, before staggering and then being outright thrown to the ground.

“AAH [BEEP]” said Clarkson, off-screen, who recognised that things were going very badly indeed.

The shot wobbled slightly, lowered, and then came to a juddering stop, as if whoever was operating the camera had calmly set it down on a table. Hammond was still visible, pinned to the floor and choking, as was the dirty great hulking spirit that had a grip on his neck. May’s voice could still be heard over all the other noise, reading out Latin at a speed that Latin was probably never supposed to be read at. The exorcism seemed to be having some effect, certainly it was creating a lot of impressive flashes and gusts of wind, but it probably wasn’t going at a pace that Hammond was comfortable with, seeing how he was rapidly running out of oxygen.

Within a few seconds of the camera being placed down, however, something six foot tall, white and bulbous-headed came hurtling in from the left of the screen and tackled the big spirity bastard right off Hammond.

“…et sanctus how the hell did he do that?”

“KEEP. READING.”

“Right, yes…dominum…”

Hammond pulled himself off the floor and staggered off in the direction of the voices while the Stig, their lone cameraman, did a brilliant job of pinning something to the floor that wasn’t supposed to be corporeal.

The ghost struggled for a few moments before going completely rigid. Apparently May had, finally, got to the important bit of the exorcism. There were a couple of bright flashes of light and a noise that was so loud that it only came through on the audio as blaring feedback, before the spirit flickered in and out of sight a few times and then disappeared completely.

The Stig rose slowly and deliberately to his feet, stood for a few seconds looking non-plussed and then walked out of frame. The shot wobbled wildly as he picked up the camera again and pointed it towards the three presenters. They, in turn, were gaping at the Stig, but it rather looked as if they were simply staring dumbfoundedly straight into the camera.

Hammond coughed.

“Where did we find him again?”

“He sort of…came to us, actually.”

“I’m never going to get used to this [BEEP].”  
________________________________________________

It was dawn; the men had emerged from the shack and were stood in front of it, silhouetted by the flames as the garage burnt away quite happily.

“Best to be safe” said May.

We’d set out to find who could get the best car to go hunting in. We’d proved that all the sturdy reliability in the world doesn’t count if your truck is as flame-retardant as an aerosol can, and that while size and weight in a car can be useful, it’ll also make you an easier target. The winner seemed to, unequivocally, be Hammond’s Chevrolet Impala, on the grounds that it was the only one that had managed to survive.

“Come on, everyone in the Metallicar.”

“If you keep calling it that, I shall be forced to strike you.”

But we also learned that no car in the world, no matter how reliable and well suited, would do you a damn bit of good if you are absolutely arse at hunting the supernatural. For that? You’ll need one of these.

The Stig stood, framed by the sunset in a classic heroic pose. Well, in theory anyway. His heart didn’t really seem to be in it. In fact, he was just, sort of, standing there. And then he wandered off.


End file.
